


The Beast of Greylock Fen

by patchworkgirl



Series: The Beast of Greylock Fen [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Bad Poetry, Flashbacks, M/M, mildly nsfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-25 22:44:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12045843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchworkgirl/pseuds/patchworkgirl
Summary: Kravitz turns over a bit of his past with the help of Taako's terrible shopping habits.





	The Beast of Greylock Fen

Kravitz opened his eyes to a gray pre-dawn haze over the hotel room, Taako snoring beside him. Taako denied that he snored, but his boyfriend found it endearing. Finding an elf who admitted sleeping was preferable to a few hours of prim meditation was weird enough. One who burrowed under the pillows and mounded six or eight blankets over himself, then slept sprawled facedown under the towering, cozy-soft edifice... Well.

 

He debated digging out the back of Taako's neck and trying to nuzzle him awake, but even trying to move reminded him of how energetic the night had been. His own body was more of a deal between his own perceptions and the fragment of the Raven Queen's power that lived inside him, and even that was pretty exhausted. Taako's regular old flesh and blood might not be up to trying to move yet.

 

This wasn't quite a hangover—also hard to get when your physical reality wasn't a straightforward matter, but possible—but he judged it might be wisest to head off that possibility. Slowly and carefully (Taako could be a surprisingly light sleeper despite the blanket castle on top of him) he inched to the edge of the bed and stepped into the kitchenette.

 

Once he had a glass of water and a bag of peanuts, of which there were entirely too many to choose from, he passed the time by poking at the several shopping bags Taako had mounded on the floor. It was very hard to tell the deliberately weird and ugly shit he intended to taunt his friends with from the exciting treasures he'd insist everyone admire later. Kravitz made a few bets with himself about the opalescent ceramic lobster and the wrap skirt printed with pink and yellow seagulls. Could go either way.

 

He was a bit surprised to find what seemed to be a picture book in one of the bags. Angus was a bit old for that, not to mention a bit precocious. Mookie was a possibility. He wasn't exactly a bookish kid, but Taako was definitely the least adept at uncle stuff of all the Highchurch kids' various bonus family members. Kravitz opened to a random page to see if the art was at least interesting, paused, and flipped back to the cover. He'd only taken it in as a shiny rectangle full of colorful shapes, but now he read the title.

 

_The Beast of Greylock Fen._

 

In his first few hundred years of service, he'd tried to collect the stories. The bardic tradition his father had trained him in despite his emerging sorcery had survived the transition to the island, and most of the early versions were never written down at all. There were mentions all over, of course, in whatever histories the neighbors put together. An island rising from the sea was a pretty noteworthy event, especially on an otherwise quiescent bit of the continental shelf. And his mother's side of the family had made a few records, too, but he'd been pretty done with them in a way he wasn't really over for a thousand years or so, and by then there was no living memory to consult. It was the Bonesplinter songs and stories he'd held onto, and a few of those had survived the Clan's name becoming the island's, and then just the stretch of water's name. He even had a few living relatives he could trace on his father's side left, though they'd been calling themselves something else for the last millenium.

 

He wasn't sure he should open the book. Taako might have meant it for a surprise, among other considerations. But it was already in his hands and somehow it was already open. A note on the inside cover informed him that all proceeds from the sale went to the Grand Library of Neverwinter Collections Restoration Fund, and that he could find more entries in the _History Alive!_ series at any participating booksellers.

 

The pictures were actually rather lovely, delicately painted woodblock prints that would have been a lot of trouble even to replicate magically in this level of detail. He'd seen himself portrayed plenty of ways and gotten pretty good at picking out the motivations of the artist, or at least the artist's patrons. The man in the pictures didn't look particularly like Kravitz, but did look more or less like a reasonable person would expect a sorcerer with his ancestry in that time and place to look. The Fen itself wasn't even really there anymore, lost over the intervening centuries to natural shifts and a few major dam projects, but the landscape looked right anyway. The author (Dr. Aeslyn Oakenthorne of Neverwinter University, apparently) had been trying for that rarest of aspirations, accuracy.

 

Maybe the history was just too old, a fact that no one living could possibly care about. No angles left, no politics, just a weird thing that happened once. Kravitz actually found the idea sort of soothing, but wondered if he should feel guilty over that relief.

 

Finally he got up the courage to start reading, and discovered Dr. Oakenthorne had decided that, as this was a children's book, she was going to write it in rhyme. Not nearly as many people were up to that as thought they were, and the bard buried in Kravitz's soul prepared to cringe.

 

_Betwixt and between two worlds he walked_

_Best beloved of two warring lines,_

_Fixed on the lakeshore where all concerned docked,_

_Keeper of peace where marshland meets pines,_

_The Banished Hound_

_Of the Splintered Sound_

_The Beast of Greylock Fen._

 

Alright, well, no, no one should have let this woman near a rhyming dictionary. But. Best beloved was a ridiculous bit of speculation that a self-respecting historian really ought to shy away from, and also sort of personally uncomfortable, given the hostile disdain his mother's family had showered him in, the distant, appraising coolness of his father's. And to call it the Splintered Sound was just pure anachronism. There'd been no sound back then. It was a long time before the island's improbable geography and Pan's goodwill scraped together enough sediment to join the land and turn the bubble of lava into just another piece of Faerun. That had been open ocean at the time, certainly not named for a clan that hadn't even moved there yet. Honestly.

 

Unfortunately, he didn't seem to be putting the book down. Being walked through his own life in questionable rhyme schemes and fetching illustrations was apparently a temptation he wasn't equipped to resist. The research was pretty good. They had Fitzroy wrong—he'd been a half-orc, too, just half human, so much simpler but still the only other mixed child of Kravitz's generation, beautiful and engrossing and entirely uninterested in him romantically, but willing to pitch in on the important stuff. Fitz who'd helped turn the broken-down old inn into a tavern in the front and a hospice in the back, shelter for displaced children and wounded bystanders, funded by coins from travelers who shook their heads at the dreadful orc barbarians who terrorized decent people along the road and who never questioned the Silverbirch side of the story.

 

Rilga made an appearance, surprising him a bit. She wouldn't have deserved it, but if he'd had to guess, he'd have assumed she was quite lost to history. His stepmother had been kind and reasonable and sometimes even warm. Almost all the time. He hadn't even been that upset when she'd thrown a bottle at him and cursed him out of the house the night after his father died. He'd have thrown some bottles if he'd thought he could have gotten away with it.

 

The pictures didn't capture that. Maybe they were too simple for the memory of his father's funeral. For standing between his half-brothers and -sisters, surrounded by their children and aware of their graying hair and fading strength while his own face showed nothing but youth and vitality. The crackle of the fire and the pounding of the drums as the greatest bard of the age joined the eternal battle at Gruumsh's side, and his eldest son waited alone and unbloodied and utterly unworthy to send him on, wearing an enemy's face.

 

Jaelle and her oldest daughter had taken over the rites that would have been his. By agreement. Kravitz had decided long before the funeral itself that he'd make things easier for everyone and let the next in line take the honors of the day. It was Nyria whose line he'd managed to trace all the way down the years, though her descendants were mostly human these days, just a few extra inches and a bit of extra toothiness to hint at the past.

 

And it was Lolsh whose grandson he'd had to toss out of the tavern for trying to sneak upstairs to the orphaned Silverbirch children Kravitz had sheltered just the same as the Bonesplinters who'd had family taken from them. He didn't remember the offender's name—these things faded so fast, two generations and his elven blood kept him too young, too detached to recognize his own half-great-nephew, or whatever you called that particular tangle of relationships.

 

Whatever you called the drunken young idiot, fueled by ale and hatred and pain, who'd set fire to the first tavern in the night, who'd taken one of the elven children but two more of their own, and Fitz, stupid brave Fitz, graying and slow but insisting on helping Kravitz drag people out of the blaze until the smoke got into his lungs too deep.

 

The idiot in question lived, but at least had the sense to keep away when Kravitz had put his friend in the ground beside his father and set about building the second of the Greylock Taverns. There'd been three in all, though the second had, as far as he knew, had an honest accident.

 

The third was the one that had the farm attached. The book only had one inn. Simpler story that way, or had the string of disasters been lost to the ages? The loss of one building, a handful of lives, such little things after a few thousand years.

 

The Beast wasn't really a feature until the third tavern went up, until the Bonesplinters and the Silverbirches had cast him off entirely, until only the truly desperate would even come to him for help. He'd spent too much time on both sides, seen how undernourished everyone's children were, how their fishing and farming returns seemed to shrink every year, how the cremation fires on the orc side and the twisted little trees that marked the graves of the wood elves proliferated wildly even when there'd been no fighting. How every young wizard and every sorcerer who could studied conjuration, but there was never enough no matter how the spell slots burned. How that was the same wherever you went.

 

How a single, honest magic user could never do enough. How the only real way to fix things was to break the rules and make new ones, and damn the consequences for a loner who belonged to no one. That was how one went about becoming a beast.

 

The book didn't mention that part. Didn't even make the lich thing very clear. Kravitz was pretty sure it was implying he'd gotten some kind of elementals to help with the island situation. He wasn't thinking very clearly by then, and tucking it back in Taako's shopping bag seemed like the thing to do.

 

“Mmm, babe, why are you always up so early?” Taako was half blind in the morning, something probably more psychological than anything else, a single-minded coffee-detecting autopilot that steered him mostly harmlessly through his environment. His sudden presence tugged Kravitz back to earth hard.

 

Didn't hurt that he was drifting around naked aside from a blanket trailing off his shoulders. He braced a long-fingered hand on Kravitz's shoulder, putting entirely too much weight on him. “Ha, was gonna show you that. I'm giving it to Lulu and her human pet so they can razz you at work.”

 

“You know what? That sounds fair.” He wasn't up to the book right now. Kravitz smiled up at Taako a little too toothily, doing his best to banish the pains of a lifetime long past. “Are you awake or is this just a false alarm?”

 

“Depends, you think we could get room service at fuck everything in the morning?”

 

“You think I'm going to take my hands off you long enough to get the door for room service?” Kravitz stood suddenly and caught playfully at Taako, who snorted sleepily and pretended to dodge away, then managed to trip on the mini-icebox in his half asleep stupor. They were tangled on the floor in short order, and Kravitz lost himself very deliberately in the moment. Not hard to do. Sleepy sex with Taako was especially delightful. He was so surprised by everything, defenses lowered, distractable but easy to please, and only sort of likely to fall asleep on top of Kravitz at an inopportune time. He didn't this time. Well, not until the frantic energy had subsided into cuddling and Kravitz had nudged him onto the blanket.

 

He was startlingly lovely, even stretched out half-awake on a kitchen floor. Loose curls cascaded around him in defiance of ordinary geometries. The warm golden-brown of his skin glowed with the bit of exertion, glowed deeper around the slightly tusky bite marks on his neck and chest and ears and thighs. Taako didn't usually go in for rough, but he did like biting. He was a treasure.

 

Kravitz doubted anyone from the Fen would believe it if they could see him now. He'd willingly walked away from their approval time and time again, searching for a right thing to do that didn't seem to exist—what Taako would call _just decisions_. He'd made the choices that had to be made. He didn't regret it a bit.

 

But he might disappear that book before Taako could hand it along to his sister. Just for a little peace of mind.

 


End file.
